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The AI opportunity - building trust in automated visual inspection

by Tim Ensor

5th May 2020

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Since leading the artificial intelligence (AI) capability at Cambridge Consultants, I’ve had the honour of helping clients identify how AI can help realize their grandest ambitions and solve their toughest challenges.

From a personal perspective, it’s been exciting to see our AI capability grow to become one of the most advanced in the industry and deliver truly game-changing innovation with our clients.

During this time, I’ve gained insights into some of the most valuable applications of AI across diverse industries.

Over the next five weeks I’ll be sharing these insights in a series of short videos called ‘The AI opportunity’.

They will lift the lid on some of our most advanced AI projects; the challenges they address for industry and the opportunities they are creating for the ambitious businesses they serve.

The first of these videos (as you will see below) focuses on using AI in high-trust applications, which is something many of our clients are grappling with. The case in point is automated visual inspection.

In this video I share insights from our work in helping a global manufacturer of medical devices with exactly this issue. I hope you find it insightful.

The next video will discuss how we helped a client overcome a lack of quality data to train deep learning models. Again, this is a common challenge we are helping clients overcome. The video will be published in another VLOG on the 12 May.

If you’d like to talk more about using AI for visual inspection or any other business challenge needing a unique AI solution, please get in touch at tim.ensor@cambridgeconsultants.com.

Transcript

Using artificial intelligence in high-trust applications is something many of our clients are grappling with. One particular area prompting plenty of thought is automated visual inspection.

Our team recently helped a global manufacturer of medical devices with exactly this issue. Their products make a real difference to the lives of thousands of patients each year, and quality is extremely important to them.

I’m Tim Ensor, and I lead the AI Capability at Cambridge Consultants. This is the first of a series of short videos on ‘The AI opportunity’.

I'll be sharing our most recent AI developments; the challenges they address for industry and the opportunities they are creating for the ambitious businesses that have deployed them.

The head of engineering at our client had been exploring the use of AI to automate the end-of-line quality inspection process. Currently, the inspection process is manually very intensive to ensure they only ever ship good products for doctors to use.

The challenge they’d always encountered was that standard neural network image classifiers are just not accurate enough to allow him to trust the AI and remove the manual inspection step from his workflow.

In addition to this, he wanted an AI to be able to identify types of defect that it hadn’t seen before.

Working closely with their manufacturing team, we developed a visual anomaly detection system that understands exactly what a good product looks like. It can identify one so confidently that good products don’t require manual inspection.

Beyond this, the system can continually learn when it does encounter new defects and to feed insights back to the manufacturing team to continually improve their processes.

By taking this approach, we’re using AI to deliver unique capability and deliver direct business benefits for our clients.

If you’d like to talk more about using AI for visual inspection or any other business challenge needing a unique AI solution, please get in touch.

Tim is the Director of Artificial Intelligence at Cambridge Consultants. He works with clients across many sectors to help them achieve business impact with world-changing technology innovation. Tim has had a string of commercial leadership roles focused on innovation in fields including telecoms, logistics and energy and working with world-leading AI, robotics and connectivity technology. He's an electronic engineer, Cambridge MBA and optimistic about using technology to make the world better.

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